In the past I’ve written about characters you’ll come across in medical school such as Patient Killer and Surgio. This week I want to address the God Squad, a group of fundamentalist Christians who are so hard-core in their beliefs that they make Billy Graham seem like a Pagan.

This is the group who schedules Spring Break trips to Latin American countries in an effort to convert the Spanish-speaking savages to their way of thinking. Awkwardness abounds when they finally realize that 99% of the residents are already Catholic. As witnessed, “You must turn from your god Haysus and believe in Jesus!”

In class, these people are the groaners whenever a lecturer mentions evolution, abortion, or women’s equality. First, women started wearing pants. It’s straight to devil worship from there.

Anatomy lab becomes problematic when they see a naked person for the first time. (I actually know a girl in my class who sincerely wished that she had been married before beginning medical school so that the first penis she would have to see would have belonged to her husband.) If paired with one of the prudes, expect a conversation like this:

Her: Is that the penis?

Me: Yes.

Her: Do they all leak like that?

Me: Yes, all penises leak embalming fluid. But it usually occurs only during ejaculation. That’s why women are so stiff after sex.

Luckily, schools are able to put a dampening on prostletyzing patients so things don’t get too out of hand. But watch out when Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons comes out in theaters…

During a useless class on how to interact with patients, somehow we got on the subject of religion, as in, do you broach the subject of religion with your patients? I had classmates who were shouting and angry with the lecturer–how DARE she tell them not to witness to their patients, God GOT them into med school on purpose, and it certainly wasn’t to treat physical complaints, but spiritual ones!

Kudos to the lecturer, though. She made a test question out of it: “True/False: It is okay to offer to pray for your patient or teach them about your religion during the office visit if they didn’t ask you to.”